A major cost factor in merchandising products is packing prepackaged items for shipment and storage and their retail display. The most successful form of retail display is achieved by prepacking items in blister display packages designed to be hung from racks of rod-like projections which extend from display walls or shelves. In many instances pegboards form the support for the projections to allow maximum versatility of space. Another popular display system is the freestanding display with a rotating central support structure.
These popular forms of retail displays have three major drawbacks. (1) The blister packages become distorted or broken due to crushing by other packages in a shipping or storage container. (2) Placing the packages on display racks is labor intensive. (3) Rearrangement of merchandise displays for sales promotion or other reasons is labor intensive.
A few attempts have been made to overcome the faults in prior merchandising systems. For instance R. Goldberg in U.S. Pat. No. 4,301,575 on "Packaging Clip" teaches the use of a spring clip to assist in unloading or loading a plurality of packages on a single peg of a rack. This is useful in moving items around on a rack but it fails to solve the shipping problem or the initial labor intensive chore of aligning packages on the clip or rack peg.
M. Tarnoff, U.S. Pat. No. 3,211,293 on "Rack Mountable Article Of Manufacture" is another attempt to overcome the faults in the display rack merchandising system. This system has the same basic shortcomings as the Goldberg system plus the retaining rubber band is left on the peg.
Specially constructed containers have been developed as an alternate means to solve some of the problems inherent in the display package merchandizing systems. Examples of such systems may found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,967,611 for "Carton for Merchandising Display Cards" issued to G. Bolinger; U.S. Pat. No. 3,148,770 for "Carton for Packaged Articles" issued to C. Cosman; U.S. Pat. No. 3,313,407 for "Carton for Storing and Loading Merchandise Cards" issued to F. Palm, Jr.; U.S. Pat. No. 3,952,872 for "Package Carded Merchandise" issued to P. Consiglio; U.S. Pat. No. 4,072,232 "Package for Multiple Containers" issued to J. Marsman et al; and Canadian Patent Number 1,052,341 for "Cartridge" issued to A. Paulin. The container approaches have many advantages but they fail to prevent package distortion and allow gravity induced crushing which can result in permanent disfigurement of the product display.
All of the prior attempts have failed to solve the problems inherent in existing blister packaging, i.e. the shipping/storage containers presently in use allow stored packages to slide down inside the shipping package and become bent because of gravitational forces. Because of the heat that is often present during the shipping and storage periods, the bent packages become permanently distorted. When the retailer is ready to display them they are unsightly.